" * * * THE HISTORY OF ADVENTURE * * * "
" Author Unknown, footnotes added by C. Ruby "
"Adventure was originally developed by William Crowther, and later"
substantially rewritten and expanded by Don Woods at Stanford Univ.
"According to legend, Crowther's original version was modelled on a"
"real cavern, called Colossal Cave, which is part of Kentucky's"
"Mammoth Caverns. That version of the game included the main maze"
and a portion of the third-level (Complex Junction - Bedquilt -
"Swiss Cheese rooms, etc.), but not much more."
Don Woods and some others at Stanford later rewrote portions of
"the original program, and greatly expanded the cave. That version"
of the game is recognizable by the maximum score of 350 points.
The latest additions were done throughout 1978-80 by David Long
"at the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business."
Long's additions include the seaside entrance and all of
the cave on the "far side" of Lost River (Rainbow Rm - Crystal
"Palace - Blue Grotto - Rotunda - beyond Joshua's Wall, etc., etc.)."
û
" === 2 === "
The surface has also been greatly increased to include a much
"more varied landscape containing swamp, marsh, seashore and"
meadowland areas. Most recent additions include the great Castle of
"Aldor, the elephants' Burial Ground, Leprechaun Rock and more."
"The current cave is more than double the size of the Woods model,"
"and moreover the puzzles and treasures are somewhat more 'dense',"
(and more difficult!) in the current version. During the expansion
"process, the code was almost entirely rewritten to permit more"
generalized handling of objects and to interpret a more complex
natural English syntax.
Except for a couple of trivial subroutines (to get user-ID's for
"logging purposes), ADVENTURE [on Compuserve] is written entirely"
"in FORTRAN. This not because Crowther/Woods/Long love FORTRAN, but"
because it is almost infinitely portable. There were indeed moments
when it took great strength to withstand the temptation to whip out some
"character handling routine in MACRO, instead of the furshlugginer"
"compiler. For example, there is an excellent rival game to ADVENTURE,"
"called DUNGEON, developed at M.I.T., which is totally non-portable since"
"it is coded in an obscure variant of two initially obscure compilers,"
and can only be transported in executable form between DEC-10's
and 20's.
û
" === 3 ==="
"Thanks are owed to Roger Matus and David Feldman, both of U. of C.,"
"for several suggestions, including the Rainbow Room, the telephone"
"booth and the fearsome Wumpus. Further thanks go to J.R. Carlson,"
Bob Silverman and John Rager for many debugging suggestions.
"Most thanks (and apologies) go to Thomas Malory, Charles Dodgson,"
"the Grimm Brothers, Dante, Homer, Frank Baum and especially Anon.,"
the real authors of ADVENTURE.
" Copyright (C) 1978, 1979, 1980, David E. Long"
"ADDENDUM: In April, 1982, Carl Ruby, a junior at California Lutheran"
"college, discovered this game and attempted to write a version in"
"BASIC for the school's Apple II computers. However, it wasn't until"
"1986 when his father bought an Apple IIc that he was able to get any"
"real work done. Learning machine language, and the data compression"
"trick, he almost squeezed the entire program into memory, but in 1994"
"he discovered Microsoft QBASIC and the Apple Adventure project was"
"abandoned. He completed a Microsoft version in 11 days, and it was"
completely debugged in October 1996.
û
" === 4 ==="
Work is now progressing on this game; the Enhanced Adventure. As of
"November, 1996, 223 rooms and six dead ends have been discovered."
"Adventure-751 is written in QBASIC, and makes extensive use of"
"satellite text files, in which most of the statements are stored."
"For example, all of the long-form room descriptions are stored"
"in a subdirectory called RMS, and are numbered. Those rooms with"
"single descriptions (Bedquilt, caretaker's storeroom, foot of Altar,"
"etc.) are stored as strings in memory."
more to come later.....
//